Airsoft Inovations Cyclone Review

[Handsonic]

So I got my hands on a cyclone today at Ultimate Airsoft, used it a few times and figured out how to set up all the internal stuff.

The first things I noticed when I got the grenade were the nice packaging, awesome patches, and just how small the grenade is. While I had to stuff my tornado into an m4 mag pouch, I can simply drop the cyclone into that very pouch.

The feel of the grenade itself is great, it's easy to hold and throw and is very lightweight unlike the fat and heavy tornados. Setting the firing mechanism of the cyclone is much simpler than the tornado, you literally just press the top part of the tornado onto a table and push a little knob forward. That's it. Once you secure the top part back onto the cyclone you gas up and fill it with BB's, which is, once again, MUCH easier than with the tornado. Just pour/scoup BB's into a bunch of openings at the bottom of the grenade and you're good to go.

There are 2 issues I have with this grenade that I feel must be known because theyre very annoying. First, maintenance. I have thrown this grenade a total of 5 times and it has needed a relube every single time. I tried throwing it unlubed once and it only blew up a little bit, not even enough to spin the grenade around. This is a disappointment since the Tornados only needed a relube once every 5 uses. The second issue is screwing on the bottom cap. This is the biggest pain in the ass ever and it actually makes preparing the cyclone take WAY longer than I expected. I'll probably get faster at it as I use it more but the other person that got a cyclone at UA also had a lot of difficulty with this. Basically, it's not just a regular screw-on cap, you have to fit a little metallic piece on the cap into a little metallic slot on the bottom of the grenade. If the fit isn't JUST right, you can't screw it on. Also, screwing it on takes quite a bit of effort.

Aside from those 2 issues, this grenade is great. When it works, the explosion is absolutely gorgeous, and the BB's fly out with a lot of force. In one of the test throws, I threw it 4 meters infront of me and a BB struck my neck and left a nice red mark for a few hours.

Overall, this is THE grenade to get for airsoft. It is reusable AND the price point is amazing, being only $50 compared to an $80 tornado, the grenade is small and lightweight, it is easier to setup than a tornado, and it is much - MUCH - cooler to set off than any other airsoft grenade out there.

Here is a quick test throw with the grenade. Watch it go off at 0.25x speed to see how well it spins:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4m00...ature=youtu.be

Here are the Velcro patches that it comes with:


Bigger images: http://postimg.org/image/bhsqstv1p/
http://postimg.org/image/kob1g40a5/

[Datawraith]

Wow, that was fast.
I (and I'm sure others) request a video of it in action!

[amano999]

I have been having problems resetting mine a bit as well but it gets easier the more i do it. The end cap is really awkward the first few times but once you kinda figure it out its fine.

I do love how easy it is to load bbs now u you just drop em in, compared to before needing to speedload them in.

Long term will have to try it more to really get good comparison to the tornado. One thing for sure is you really feel the hits. The bbs come out much faster than the Tornado. I have had tornados land at my feet and cant say i really felt a hit.

[Handsonic]

Originally Posted by Datawraith

Wow, that was fast.
I (and I'm sure others) request a video of it in action!

Ill put one up, it's very rushed so don't expect quality :P

Edit: Video up, check the OP

[MultipleParadox]

Out of curiosity, where did you guys get yours?

[MadMax]

Hey Handsonic,

Thanks for the review!

Usually we find that with short discharges (grenade does not discharge a lot of it's pellets), the cause is that the end cap didn't end up properly aligned with the body. If the alignment pip isn't set into it's socket, the rubber gasket in the end cap does not make a good seal with the grenade body and a lot of gas bypasses some of the path that it needs to flow through. Also a misaligned end cap can allow a lot of gas to exit totally outside of the grenade.

It's been awhile since we tested unlubed operation, but my recollection is that the grenade is more tolerant to working with dry gas than the Tornado because the plastic pressure vessel has a smoother finish than we can machine into an aluminum valve body. I'm also rather spoiled. When I do a grenade test, I grab a bottle of lubricated propane at work that someone else has injected silicone into.

I apologize for the crappy end cap lug. It worked well enough compared to a lot of other issues that were going to hell and I didn't get around to seeing that it needed improvement until I had fired very crummy prototypes a few hundred times. It has become second nature for me using the Cyclone because I've lived lived with it for the past six years. To put things in perspective, I think Tornado took me about a year to design and tool up.

While a long product gestation cycle provides time to work out a lot of bugs, it also gradually makes me a crummy user tester. I become overly familiar with the thing that I sometimes fail to see some of the problems that new users may have. If I were a more confident designer I might brush off difficulties that new users have as "newb problems", but I try not to do that. At some point a product becomes hard to use because the designer has lost perspective.

We did do some late testing of new users and found that alignment of the end cap was an issue so Manchovie (he's our artist) totally rearranged the user manual to put more emphasis on the alignment issue and we applied some silver Sharpie marker on the alignment bits to draw more attention to the important features.

It is also possible that your Cyclone got too cold. I don't know how frequently you fired your Cyclone in your five throws, but it does take longer to absorb heat than Tornado. The aluminum valve body in Tornado is much more thermally conductive than the plastic unibody in Cyclone. I wanted Cyclone to be more economically manufactured than Tornado so I did what I could to reduce the usage of large machined parts and bury more integrated features in the moulded parts.

I hope that part of the problem is due to Cyclone being quite a different product from the things that players are already used to. An experienced player can basically pick up any GBB pistol and get it shooting inside of 2min, but someone totally unfamiliar with airsoft (or firearms) would be gimpy for awhile.

With a product like Cyclone I the ground is not prepared for me. We have no precedent for a thing that works like this.

[Handsonic]

Originally Posted by MadMax

Hey Handsonic,

Thanks for the review!

Usually we find that with short discharges (grenade does not discharge a lot of it's pellets), the cause is that the end cap didn't end up properly aligned with the body. If the alignment pip isn't set into it's socket, the rubber gasket in the end cap does not make a good seal with the grenade body and a lot of gas bypasses some of the path that it needs to flow through. Also a misaligned end cap can allow a lot of gas to exit totally outside of the grenade.

It's been awhile since we tested unlubed operation, but my recollection is that the grenade is more tolerant to working with dry gas than the Tornado because the plastic pressure vessel has a smoother finish than we can machine into an aluminum valve body. I'm also rather spoiled. When I do a grenade test, I grab a bottle of lubricated propane at work that someone else has injected silicone into.

I apologize for the crappy end cap lug. It worked well enough compared to a lot of other issues that were going to hell and I didn't get around to seeing that it needed improvement until I had fired very crummy prototypes a few hundred times. It has become second nature for me using the Cyclone because I've lived lived with it for the past six years. To put things in perspective, I think Tornado took me about a year to design and tool up.

While a long product gestation cycle provides time to work out a lot of bugs, it also gradually makes me a crummy user tester. I become overly familiar with the thing that I sometimes fail to see some of the problems that new users may have. If I were a more confident designer I might brush off difficulties that new users have as "newb problems", but I try not to do that. At some point a product becomes hard to use because the designer has lost perspective.

We did do some late testing of new users and found that alignment of the end cap was an issue so Manchovie (he's our artist) totally rearranged the user manual to put more emphasis on the alignment issue and we applied some silver Sharpie marker on the alignment bits to draw more attention to the important features.

It is also possible that your Cyclone got too cold. I don't know how frequently you fired your Cyclone in your five throws, but it does take longer to absorb heat than Tornado. The aluminum valve body in Tornado is much more thermally conductive than the plastic unibody in Cyclone. I wanted Cyclone to be more economically manufactured than Tornado so I did what I could to reduce the usage of large machined parts and bury more integrated features in the moulded parts.

I hope that part of the problem is due to Cyclone being quite a different product from the things that players are already used to. An experienced player can basically pick up any GBB pistol and get it shooting inside of 2min, but someone totally unfamiliar with airsoft (or firearms) would be gimpy for awhile.

With a product like Cyclone I the ground is not prepared for me. We have no precedent for a thing that works like this.

Thanks for the explanation. I will definitely have to retest unlubed throws with the Cyclone. If the result is different, I will edit the review. I am still at awe at how much work you put into this amazing piece of technology, it is truly a great airsoft innovation... no pun intended.

I've also been experiencing some issues regarding gas leaks, though I am fairly certain it is because of my own stupidity. Sometimes, when I try to gas up the grenade, it spits everything back out violently. My hands and face have gotten very cold because of it. How do I prevent it from hiccuping like that? It only happens when the valve is sticking out a little bit too much and I don't know if I should push it back in with force or not.

[MadMax]

We employ a two port fill valve in our grenade design. Jabba wabbo hoodah thing that you do it with.

It's not jargon. Our fill valves open two ports when you fill. One port conducts liquid into the grenade reservoir. The other port allows the escape of gas from the resevoir which at first blush seems counterproductive.

What most players expect is a fill valve that isn't apparently leaky. It quietly accepts fill through a single passage connecting the propane tank.

The problem with single port fill valves is that they only allow liquid transfer from tank to device until device reservoir pressure equalizes with tank pressure. It is possible for reservoir pressure to equalize with the tank before you have transferred enough liquid. This issue is more likely if your tank temperature has gotten cold after say filling a few GBBR mags. It is especially likely with devices that need a high liquid proportion of the fill capacity of their reservoir as Cyclone does.

What a 2 port fill valve does is to vent some gas from the top of the reservoir to permit the continued transfer of liquid into the reservoir. This first stage of fill will sound leaky. When sufficient liquid has been transferred, it flows up an overflow feature which lets liquid to escape. This 2nd stage of fill pishes out a white mist of liquid from the valve which prevents overfilling. You do not want to fill a reservoir chock full of liquid leaving no gas space which is the other intent of the overflow feature. It preserves a minimum gas space which prevents the reservoir from developing a very high pressure when it warms back up again.

With a single port valved reservoir, it is possible to achieve very high fill proportion if you chill the reservoir first, but even without the explosion issue, you will not reserve any expanded gas volume for a device like a GBB to operate from. Your first shots will be weak and blast out a lot of liquid mist. It may even not have enough sustained pressure to operate properly until you've blasted off several shots of liquid.

I didn't invent the 2 port fill valve. It is a common feature of nearly every Japanese airsoft gun which is one of the reasons they operate more consistently than some Taiwanese guns that employ single port valves. You always get enough propellent into a TM mag with a leaky seeming fill valve and your first shots are punchy because they have an appropriate amount of expanded gas to work from.

Fill until you see a white mist coming out of the valve which indicates that your reservoir is done.